The Trial

Discuss K.’s feelings of guilt and how these feelings evolve over the novel. Where do these feelings come from?

Analyze the role of female characters in the novel. What is the significance of K.’s reliance on women?

What literary strategies and devices does Franz Kafka use to illustrate the dehumanizing effect of bureaucracy?

What does justice mean to K.? In what ways is justice absent from K.’s trial?

Discuss the character of Fräulein Bürstner. Why does she continue to resurface throughout the novel, especially in the final chapter?

Kafka’s depiction of the bureaucratic state is often read as a prescient critique of the totalitarian states that arose in Europe shortly after the author’s death. How does The Trial comment on the relationship between the individual and the state in the modern world?

The novel ends with Josef K.’s exclamation that he is dying “like a dog!” How does the court deprive him of his humanity? In what ways is this death dehumanizing?

Analyze the parable of the doorkeeper in Chapter 9. How do you interpret this parable within the context of the novel?